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Two weeks ago, the San Fran Fed released "research" on the topic of whether "it is still worth going to college." What it "found" was that "Earning a four-year college degree remains a worthwhile investment for the average student.... The average college graduate paying annual tuition of about $20,000 can recoup the costs of schooling by age 40.

A important shift in the Republicans’ negotiating stance over the austerity fight (do we go Dem lite or Republican high test?) was duly noted in the Financial Times a day ago, but a search in Google News (“debt ceiling”) suggests a lot of other commentators have not yet digested its significance, so it seemed worthy of a short recap here.

Attitudes towards debt on credit cards began to change long before the financial crisis, according to The UK Cards Association.
In a new report, the trade body tracks the shift in spending and borrowing on plastic from 2000 through 2010, labelling the period “a decade of two halves”.
From 2000 to 2005, banks and other lenders recorded strong growth across all forms of card use in the UK, followed by a “sharp retrenchment” thereafter in the use of credit cards.

Lynn Windle, like most Americans, never saw a problem with having credit cards. A 50-year-old realtor from McKinney, Texas, she never really thought about how credit cards affected her finances, until the day she got in a fight with one of her credit card companies over their interest rates.

We have been warning for years that as a result of the Fed's disastrous policies, America's middle class is being disintegrated and US adults are surviving only thanks to insurmountable debtloads. But not even we had an appreciation of how serious the problem truly was. We now know, and it is a shocker: according to new research by the Urban Institute, about 77 million Americans have a debt in collections. The breakdown by region:

According to the study, over half of businesses have some form of corporate debt averaging £144,980. More than a third of these small businesses rely on personal guarantees from their business owners to obtain the bank loans, overdrafts and other corporate debt, which are essential to keep cash flowing in their businesses; yet over half have no cover in place to repay this debt in the event of the business owner dying or becoming terminally or critically ill.